


the indifferent stars above

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Hate Sex, Jealousy, Love Confessions, M/M, Pining, Romance, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, it's complicated - Freeform, spot the persuasion influence, the philosophy of names, trauma processing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:35:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25359286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Returning is a complicated thing. The world does not stay in place while you've been gone.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 31
Kudos: 77





	1. September 1848

_"A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,_   
_And planted cypress round;_   
_And left her to the indifferent stars above_   
_Until I carved these words:_   
_She was more beautiful than thy first love,_   
_But now lies under boards."_

\- W.B. Yeats, A Dream of Death

* * *

_Aston Abbotts, Buckinghamshire, England  
_ _September 1848_

There is only one path out and around Aston Abbotts, so he takes it, skirting the house and its fine gardens, still laid under a hushing blanket of fog and mist.  He often rides along the river in the morning.  Look at it, wide and dark blue, the woods hugging the edges like mountains might crowd a pass. The soil is good here. If you dig your hands into the ground, they will come away filled with black earth. The water blooms with green algae in the spring and summer, bits of plankton and rotifers. The fishermen catch pike and perch, chub and catfish. They gut them there, right in their boats, the smell of fishstink like salt and blood in the air. 

He keeps half an eye on the road, half in his thoughts. Aston Abbotts has been a reprieve for him, yet they are expecting a party to arrive sometime in the mid-afternoon. A Will Coningham and his wife Elizabeth should come by carriage soon, along with their brother, one Captain James Fitzjames. It is the final name that Francis is most familiar with; it is also the one that causes him the most disquiet. 

“Steady then,” he murmurs to his horse, guiding her back toward the house. The grey of early morning softens the world. Nothing too bright, nothing too sharp. In some ways, after years spent without color, it’s a comfort. Francis brings his mare to the stables and returns to the house, nodding to the groom and housekeeper as he does. 

The Abbey at Aston Abbotts, Sir James Clark Ross’ country home, sits proudly against a dark green lawn. The village and house are set deep within the Buckinghamshire countryside. The trees dominate the view. Yew and dogwood, silver birch and spindle. After four long years above the timberline and taiga, with only the wood he had sailed in on, Francis never gets enough of the sight of them. These morning rides and walks both give him time in quiet reflection and also time to spend among only the birdsong and the dappled shadows of the alder and beech that grow tightly along the path. 

Quiet reflection is cherished and stolen these days, as the house itself is never still. Even in the deep of night, Francis can hear the hush of the house settling. Long before sunrise there are the murmurs and susurrations of the cook and maids, earliest to rise. At any given moment, there might be laughter. The house is just as he remembers, though the hedges are taller and there are children’s voices in the halls. 

It is strange to be an island of ice in the middle of such warmth; Francis worries over his presence, attempting to keep mind of his somber mood. Even without his past, Francis wonders if he had ever kept so much lightheartedness within himself as the Ross children. He had been a strange, rounded child, with a convex belly and a preference to hang around the adults in their conversations. Differences are never looked kindly upon and he was the same here, different in all the usual, expected ways. The sort of differences one would remark on later like an explorer, as if they were the first to be too short or too tall, too loud or too quiet. To us, each private discovery is new again. 

In his room, changing from his riding clothes, he finds his eye wandering to the window, seeking the treeline again. It is a sailor’s habit to seek the horizon; it is the habit of every shipwrecked man to look to the earth. Constant reassurance. Look, there. See the black soil and green grass again, see the early red and gold of the turning leaves. You are steady, sailor, on solid ground again. 

You are safe.

His hands still shake, all these months later. Even in the lingering warmth, those indulgent golden weeks as August fades into early September, he can never get the cold out of his knuckles. 

It had been May when Ross had found them. A month on the shale. A month he will never forget.

It had very nearly been too late; Francis never forgets this either.

He remembers James’ hands. How they had gripped the railing next to him, watching English land grow larger on the far horizon. Francis did not need to look to know the owner of the ancient calluses and pale skin, the long and fine-boned fingers. Hands that were stronger than they looked. Rougher too. The mild wind had caught in James' dark curls, pulling them backward and baring his strong jaw to the oncoming landfall. It had been very late. Or very early. All things are a matter of point of view and Francis had had no desire to quibble over definitions. No, don't consider margins. Delineations. Not the black line of ink between himself and the man next to him. He and James. Piles of skin and bone, beating hearts and bruised lungs. The lines under their eyes were the same, the catch in their breath the same. When they looked toward home, they counted the same number of empty seats. Every man lost had been lost to both. 

_Is_ still lost to both. Grief is a continuous thing.

They had docked in Greenhithe, stepping into an England that had gone on without them, like ghosts made real again. Francis had signed his name on the dotted line of the muster books when the journey had begun, nearly four long years ago. Now, returned safely and somewhat intact to British soil, he had signed his name with the purser, gathering four years’ backpay. The court martial had been in the summer, not long after their return. That had been the last time Francis had seen James, still too thin and too quiet in his dress uniform.The skin at James' hairline had been still pink and tender. Newly healed. James looked at him, dark eyes to his own. There was a moment where he might have said something. 

He did not.

“Write to me, will you?” James had murmured. Yet still, the letters had seemed stilted and had dried up. He doesn’t know what to think, nor what to make of it. Perhaps James’ request had been only a genteel kindness, one of those pretty manners of gentlemen that Francis has never understood. 

He frowns, righting the sleeves and leaning in to fix his tie and stock. A wide hand smooths his jacquard waistcoat over the curve of his stomach. Francis has rarely found use for mirrors, preferring to keep the image of himself in the very back of his mind, shoved out of sight like an apostate’s Bible, yet now he troubles over himself. Dipping his forefingers into the washbasin, he tames the few wild hairs near his ears. He smooths the coat, his hand stilling over his chest, there at the collarbone.

Sometimes he feels foolish, having his heart upended by someone not written upon him from the start.

There is some small comfort in a name. Francis knows the shape of the name on his clavicle, the unfamiliar syllables, the uncommon (to him) cadence. A Portuguese name. Francis had looked it up once, while on shore leave, finding that it meant “a wandering explorer”. Fitting, he had thought, that the name scribbled upon him would be another lost soul.

He has never found a match. There had been a man once, with this name, but Francis had not been writ upon him in return. At fifty-one years old, Francis has stopped looking. It is not his lot in life to find the matching set. Indeed, at this point, Francis wonders if God had gotten it wrong and if James instead should have been scribbled into his skin. That’s the trouble with the marks, their silent observance. He might argue with God and scratch at the damnation in his own cells, but that would change nothing. The marks ask nothing. They promise nothing. Marriages and lovers come and go, ignoring the lines on their bodies. Happy marriages even. The names promise nothing and compel nothing, only sit there in black ink, bearing the beat of someone else’s heart.

Some never see them. The commonly accepted theory is that a mark first manifests when you meet your other half. Yet, as they bloom silent and secret, many do not notice until days or weeks later, wondering who they might have spoken to in passing that could have possibly borne that name.

In Francis’ own terrible luck, he had found his own during a bath on the upper deck. It had been 1814 and his ship had docked in Rio, there in the shadow of the Sugarloaf Mountains. Someone he had spoken to - a sailor, a merchant, a man in the street - had borne this name and Francis could not account for it.

There have been ships that would bring him back to Brazil, yet Francis had never boarded one. He wonders if James has a name on his skin, if he’s been wounded by a brush with his other half too. If he knows who it was or if, like Francis, it had happened without his awareness or consent, something to be discovered in a mirror while changing clothes. (He has seen only glimpses of James' skin. A shirt pushed up or pulled aside, a flap undone. There is much unaccounted for, like a map left unfinished.) 

* * *

When he sees James again, all long legs and slender arms unfolding from a carriage, Francis holds his breath. 

“Hello Francis,” James says, a small smile on his lips and warmth in his eyes. 

“James,” Francis ignores his outstretched hand and pulls the other man into a hug, one that is swiftly returned. “You are a terrible correspondent. I thought that was rather my role.”

“Come,” Ross says with a wide grin, waving them inside. “Drag your collie shangles inside. You can duke it out over dinner.”

“Oh, I have a tale or two to tell about this devil,” Will laughs. 

Francis raises an amused brow. “I would be keen to hear it.”

James affects a groan. “You’re all set against me, the lot of you.”

“Yes,” Will teases. “We absolutely are.”

They all turn to him, laughing. Francis looks back once more at James. There is fondness but no smile. Francis has long noticed this, in the years they have spent together. James always smiles when there are others to see and never smiles when there are not.  He looks tired in a way he had never seemed four years ago. The exhaustion creeps in at the edges of his eyes, the slight downturn of his mouth. The lines on his cheeks are deeper still, dug as deep as a grave. 

Francis watches the brothers, warmth in his chest blooming at the sight of their easy laughter. If he didn’t know better, he’d call it love. He does know better, so he leaves it nameless instead. His happiness is always with a dark pearl in the center, like a peach pitted with melancholy. Would he feel this same warmth if there was nothing on his shoulder and someone in his arms? How much of love is the wanting of it? If your heart is the open vessel, can love pour in for anyone passing by?

We wonder about soulmates. It’s easy to think about, out on the water, where the night darkens both sky and water so deep, you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. To believe that there is a great love waiting for you promises a someone at the other side. A true love sits like a weight at the edge of the world, drawing everything toward it. Francis may not know his other half but he can feel the weight of their existence shaping the curves of his life. 

* * *

Dinner glides smoothly into sherry in the sitting room and a game of playing cards at the table. The night is easy, spirits kept high.

One by one, the group dwindles, finding their way to their beds. Francis finds himself alone in the sitting room with James. Each in their seat, half-staring at the fire, quietly keeping their comfortable silence. With nothing to distract him, it’s easier to study the other man’s profile. James has not gained as much weight back as Francis had hoped, leaving him too-spare and making his profile severe and hawkish. At first glance, the dark curls and elegant clothing give the impression of a happy, well-kept gentleman. Someone who knows him less might continue to believe this, yet Francis knows better. The fire spells out a bleak heart, showing the heavy lines that gather at his eyes and mouth, digging trenches in his cheeks. There are bags beneath his eyes and his fingers twitch and foot taps in that very James Fitzjames manner of anxiety and exhaustion. 

Francis hadn’t meant to stare; he finds himself met with dark eyes.

“Have I offended you, Francis?” James asks, chewing on the inside of his lower lip.

Francis blinks. “What - Christ, _no._ Why in the seven blasted Hells would you think this?”

“Just - from our letters, or, lack thereof - I wondered.”

He hesitates, remembering the short letter James had last sent him. “I did not know if you still wished for a reply. I did not want to add to your burdens and, well, trading correspondence with a tired old man is hardly something - "

“Francis,” James says, quirking a smile. “If you _ever_ dare imagine your letters a burden again, I shall write you an epic poem about Birdshit Island and force you to listen to it.”

“Ah, the sheer _horror,_ ” Francis says, his eyes gleaming.

“Don’t tempt me, you awful creature. You may laugh now but you’ve no idea of the depraved things I could curse you with. I daresay I might even insist upon your attending every bloody Admiralty event in full dress _and_ personally introduce you to every single person there.”

“Now that truly is a horror.”

James laughs. This time, the shadows on his face gently ease.

“I’ve missed you, my old friend,” Francis says, cupping his tea in both hands.

“You should have come.”

“I didn’t want to intrude. A man needs his quiet, especially after four years with none at all.”

James looks at him then flicks his eyes to the fire, looking inward instead. “It’s different with you for some reason. I don’t tire when it’s you.” He pauses. “Perhaps it’s because you were there.”

“You don’t have to bear it alone.”

“Do you feel it?” James asks. He has asked this question before. The image of James with wet eyes in _Terror_ ’s Great Cabin haunts Francis, blurring the lines of their quiet room. His hair had fallen in damp, soaked waves around his face, grief etching itself into his skin. Even now, Francis can see the echoes.

He knows James better now. Knows the question for what it is: _am I alone?_

“I feel it.” The same answer: _no._

“I sometimes fear I was born to tragedy,” James says, an odd smile twitching his mouth. 

A smile. Francis has learned and cataloged each and every one of James' smiles over the years. This one makes his blood cold, ice rivers in his veins. As they had walked, some men had simply stopped. Had sat down on the shale, skin burnt red under the relentless sun, saying _I'm tired now, I'll follow along shortly._ There had always been a strange smile on their faces as they sat down, putting their bones to rest. The smile was sometimes still on their faces days later, when Francis had circled back and found them still sitting, never to move again. 

There had been two men in a boat, he remembers. They'd put their packs of aging chocolate down, leaning their foreheads against each other. _We'll follow soon,_ they'd said. Francis had known from the smiles on their faces what he might find later, still in the same spot.  He hates this smile. How had it been? James in his cream gansey, sitting morose at the table. _How long do you think it would take to freeze to death,_ James would ask. Francis never had an answer. 

"Penny for your thoughts," James murmurs with a sly grin. A raise of an impertinent brow. Francis looks over. 

“For once, I must confess I thought of nothing at all.”

James nods, staring at the fire again. The faint light casts a spell on the crimson wallpaper, turning it the color of blood. 

“There’s talk of the Passage again.”

“Christ in Heaven, will they not let the ink dry on the damned obituaries before they send more men to their deaths?”

James shrugs. “No. No, not at all.”

"And men will join up. The desperate and the damned, we always do," Francis mutters, rubbing a thumb over the handle of the cup. "Trying to prove ourselves to Our Father in Heaven and the ones we live with at home." Their tragic headlines will not matter, not to someone thirsty for the ocean. Not to someone with wanderlust in their blood. Sophia had once accused him of only keeping two drawers full in his dresser, one foot always half out the door, ready to take to the sea again. It is true enough, anyone born near the water can tell you. You never leave it fully, there is only high tide and low tide. Ebb and flow, sooner or later, it will call you back. There is something of the sea he aches for even now. The wide expanse of grey waves with white heads, the flat promise of an open horizon. No buildings to crowd the gleam of the sun. On the open water, no one keeps the sky away from you.

“My father,” James laughs. It’s bitter and unlike him. “As I told you, was a ridiculous man. A consul general.”

“In Argentina, wasn’t it?”

James shakes his head. “Brazil.” Francis always has a strange feeling about this place. He buries it deep.

“And you were born there, if I recall correctly,” Francis says, keeping his voice measured. “James, I'm an old man. Indulge me, I’ve forgotten the musters by now, what year was that?”

“July 1813.”

Francis nods. He wonders about the name on his own body, a strong, Portuguese name given often in Brazil. He remembers the soft air in Rio against his cheek and the passionate blue of the sky above. It had been early 1814. 

It's just like himself, same as always. Francis Crozier, a story of almost but not-quite.

* * *

The sun has long disappeared below the ground. James stands at the door to his room. Francis has followed him, ostensibly on the pretext of showing the way. He watches how James’ hand rests on the doorknob, feeling an odd reluctance to break the moment.

"Is the room to your liking?" He can hear the thickness in his own voice. James stares intently at him, bright with something Francis doesn't dare to name. His skin is far too tight for his body and his scalp prickles. 

"Well, it’s not a tent, thus I suppose it’s more than adequate,” he says dryly, raising a brow. “It’s a beautiful room, Francis. In all seriousness.”

Francis’ mouth quirks. Since when had they stood so close together? His nostrils twitch. He can smell James from this distance. He is rich with the scent of wool and lye soap. Macassar oil. The world has narrowed to these mere inches between them. He considers the molecules, one after another, that lead from himself to this man. Skin to oxygen to hydrogen to skin. James' eyes drag up Francis’ body, from the line of his hip to his chest to his mouth. 

(Francis has not been looked at like this in recent memory. He is suddenly insecure; he knows he is lacking.) 

“I’m glad to hear it.” Francis murmurs. He watches James grin. When had the start of a beard begun on that pale face? The shadow hints over the bottom half of his face and Francis feels another low pulse of arousal shoot through him. The younger man is a study in contrasts, plain and yet equally unforgettable. 

He cannot look away from James’ mouth and his own waters. He wants so much. (He is not allowed.) Dark eyes find his own. Francis hesitates. He wants to ask if he can come in, renew their ice-born familiarity. But this is neither the place nor the time. 

Rules are different here.

"Goodnight, Francis,” James whispers, leaving Francis alone in the hall.

* * *

How had it started? 

It had started in the Great Cabin, Fitzjames shoved against a bookshelf, one map borrowed against another. Francis had wanted the land of James Clark Ross’ body and only kept the map of his memory. James Fitzjames, spare and lean, hair long enough to wrap around his fist, could do in a pinch. Not quite but close enough. A book, a play, a diorama. Something to visit, to stand in. Hold in place. Francis burns to remember the words even now, months later. What had the look on James' face been? Revulsion? Pity, at least. He'd wiped Francis' come from between his thighs with the tails of Francis' shirt and somehow still seemed untouchable and above, even with the marks of Francis' bite littered across his back. The next day, James had sat across from him at dinner, speaking of James Clark Ross. " _Would that he were here with us now. apart from being a newlywed."_ One dark brow raised, his baiting mouth left half-open. A face for a fist. For a kiss. 

Francis had only glared.

The next time, weeks later, James had stormed into _Terror'_ s Great Cabin, pulling the door shut behind him and whisking Francis' maps to the floor. His dark eyes had flared and fury had been bitten between his fine white teeth. Francis could taste the anger in the lines of his body when James had kissed him.

"You mocked me in front of everyone," James hissed, pulling at Francis' wool vest. 

"You shot first," Francis bit back, both in words and teeth. " _Melodrama_. I could have gutted you for it, hung you up to dry."

"Do your worst." 

"I'll do more than that," Francis said to the inward curl of James' ear. His hand settled on the firm push of James' cock against his trousers. 

"I'll not debase myself for you while you think of him," James had hissed, pushing Francis to the wall and a thigh between his legs. Francis pushed at James without any real force. James worked his hands at Francis' collar, deft, elegant fingers at his tie and stock. 

A hand in his hair, his eyes closed. _Don't talk, imagine it's red. Copper. The hair in my hands and the hair between your legs. Don't talk._ He had tried to keep the image in his mind and saw a copper-haired man, furious, with intensely dark eyes. A mix of James and James. That's the trouble with boundaries. With lines being crossed. Cross over a boundary enough times and you'll lose the shape of it. Wear it out. Again.

"Stop it," James hissed, crashing his mouth to Francis'. 

Francis pushed back, giving no quarter. 

"What do you want?"

"Suck my cock," James bit, his eyes glittering. Francis went to his knees without complaint, watching James' eyes widen. James' cock twitched as his breath ran against it, where the taut head rested against his lower lip.  A hand curled in his hair, pulling Francis up to look. "Don't close your eyes," James said. 

Francis nodded. Dark hair, dark eyes. A James in his mouth. He had been surrounded by blue. Blue sky, blue lips, blue fingers and toes. Blue wool. Yet, staring into James' eyes, he could not remember blue. Years ago, at another point in the south, with another James in his arms, Francis would have known what to say. " _James_ ," he would cry, spread like a banquet before Ross, swallowing the other man in his body. Later, time and distance apart, with another James pressed against him, he tried the same. 

"James, please." 

"Don't." James' sharp voice hissed, as bitter as the come that spilled down his throat. "Don't call me that."

"What - _James_?" 

"Don't call me by his name."

_What should I call you?_ Examine what he had held in his hands, a James: open-mouthed and insouciant, long-haired and long-limbed, easy with a smile and with a laugh. Quick with a joke. Warm-skinned. The kind of man you can imagine another day with, another week, another month, years even, though you know you should not. A name is definition, a name implies a set of similarities. A grouping. Something we can know the shape of, if not the finer points. The taxonomy of these men, _James_ as their genus. It's in the details where the differences come. The species level, the individual level. James Clark Ross and James Fitzjames, James Fitzjames and James Clark Ross. 

What came first? You or your name? James, would you be another man should you have borne another name? Francis breathed him in, James from head to toe, and wondered if he would have craved this man as much should he have been born a John or a Jacob. Would he have even been the same man, this James Fitzjames, if he had been saddled with another name? 

(For that matter, who would Francis have become, should he himself have been a James?)

Francis felt drunk then and feels drunk now; each time with nothing in his blood but James. 


	2. November 1848

_London, England  
November 1848  
_

Everything glitters. When he enters the building, it’s with his head high, wondering if this is how conquered men had walked the streets of Rome, looking out upon the very shape and structure of their imprisonment. Cages can be beautiful and James knows this now more than anyone, looking at the marbled floors and the carved Ionic pillars, the gilding that graces every curve, the sumptuous paintings and velvet fabric within.

A party, of course, to celebrate the returned expedition. Once upon a time, James had loved a party. Now, his throat feels choked with dust.

The Admiralty has spared no expense for this, the Triumph of their heroes. James wonders if he is to be paraded through the halls of the building, dressed in Britannia’s costume and hoisted up on someone else’s shoulders.  The stiff collar and scratchy wool of his dress uniform chafes in a way it had never done before. James flexes his arm, trying to smooth the fabric over himself. It’s different these days, left to dress himself. In a moment, he misses his steward, John Bridgens, wondering how he might fare and how deftly he had done up James’ buttons and snipped a thread with his white teeth. Last he has heard, Bridgens had taken rooms with _Terror_ ’s captain of the foretop, Mr. Peglar, somewhere in London. Neither of the two men has come tonight. James envies them. 

He watches the dancers. Forward and backward, to and fro. Up and down. This old waltz of forgiveness and advancement, then retreat again. The house glitters with silver and gold. Lit lamps and candles, shining crystal. Champagne sparkles from every tray on every jacketed and offering arm. It glitters from velvet window drape to shimmering silk dresses. It catches on bowls of oranges and persimmons, pomegranates and pears. Everything laid out for the offering. The fame sits stickily between his shoulder blades. _You're a hero, James,_ they tell him, clinking their glasses against his own. A hero. As if he had not let one-hundred and twenty-seven men go to their bleak deaths. _A hero? Or a murderer?_ He stares at the cup. Innocent Delftware porcelain, a quiet silver spoon. Blameless Ceylon. It seems absurd to take tea. To request a specific temperature, a certain type of steeping. Just the right amount of sugar, just the right amount of milk. There had been a time when his men had been grateful to boil the legs of their fallen comrades. He knows the taste of human flesh. He knows the cut of frostbite. His hands shake. Look here, a monster in the center of London, stirring a cup of tea.

_One-hundred and twenty-seven._

The lights almost glitter in the evening, too bright for what he has grown accustomed to. The darkness in the Arctic had only been relieved by braziers and lanterns. For months, the sun had been either weak or not at all. The little light he had been allowed was the pale sun and what filtered through the Preston Patent Illuminators. Now abandoned and left behind. It is strange, how something so once a part of your daily existence, can be simply left to rot. That someday he would walk away from those Illuminators and never see them again. He walks slowly, carefully keeping to the perimeter, one glass of champagne held tightly in his hand. So tightly that his tendons are visible and his jaw aches from where it clenches, molars scraping against one another in a tandem misery. A statue dominates the center of the room. A beautiful twist of stone and metal, shaped into two ships and the figure of a man holding a lantern aloft. James wonders what the man is trying to see with his light. In the ice, lack of light had not been his concern.

"All that for a bloody statue,” James mutters bitterly, hearing the familiar footfall of his former captain. Francis draws next to him, his own face tilted upward. Light runs down along the planes of his forehead and cheeks. 

"To commemorate the sacrifices of the brave men we lost,” Francis says, his voice laced with a quiet irony. “Or so I’m told.”

His gut twists. 

The statue is beautiful and James is cold to look at it. How many dead men can this account for? How much can be transmuted into metal and a tale, stone and a story? Look at these men and the angels carved among them, their names etched into the base. The statues do not speak, the statues don’t say _David Young had blue eyes_ or _Graham Gore laughed with his belly._ Look here, at unblinking eyes and unmoving mouths, as quiet as a grave.

It does not say _John Irving once won a prize in a math competition._

It does not say that James Fitzjames cannot sleep, that when he closes his eyes there is nothing of darkness. Just the uncaring and indifferent stars, as immovable as stone, watching his blood seep through his shirt. It does not say that James cannot sleep and likely never will again. Each night, he closes his eyes and finds the dead already waiting for him. Some with holes in their bodies, some with blood in their teeth.

How can he escape? The dead travel with us.

* * *

Parties have punctuated most of the season, bringing James to regret coming to town. Each invitation entreating him to dress up yet again in the wool that might have been his shroud and tell stories of distant ice to faint society. There is small talk to make and shadows to hide himself in. He aches for somewhere miles away. For Rose Hill, or indeed, even The Abbey at Aston Abbotts, where Francis might be found.

Tonight, at least, Francis is here. James watches how Francis keeps to the edges of the room, bearing the weight of his well-tailored coat uneasily upon his shoulders. When the meal is served, he takes no wine and eats little. James understands; rich food turns his stomach these days. Something in the gnarled pit of his belly wants for boiled ox-cheek and tinned parsnips. Salted beef and hardtack. A fox caught in the snow and cooked over an open fire, perhaps. Not this. The freshly baked rolls with their sweet cream butter feel rich and oily on his tongue. The bechamel is a gluey paste down his gullet. He suffers a bite of his souffle, filled with Gruyere and parmesan, and pushes the remainder away. No one says anything. After too much wine, they ask if anyone had roasted another man's leg or stripped the meat from a dead sailor's ribs. No one looks at his plate. These riches would have served his crew much better than they do he. Sick climbs the back of his throat. He swallows it down. Across the table, he watches Francis' fingers worry the stem of his wine glass and push the roast pork around his plate. He has eaten as sparsely as James and the smile is tight in the corners of his mouth. 

There is laughter. A woman brushes her hand against Francis’ elbow. 

Sophia Cracroft looks ethereal in white. Her long hair is drawn back, bright against her skin. James tightens his grip on his drink. It doesn’t seem fair that Sophia Cracroft should be the arms to open to Francis now. Not now, after they have spent three years shifting in the pack ice, polished and sanded by ice and bitter cold. James wants to reach for Francis and wipe the worry from his brow, his too-steady hands. Miss Cracroft had not been there. Could not understand what it is to bury a friend, a comrade, a mentor, with your own two hands. Could not know what it meant to feel sick fill your lungs, to open yet another spoiled tin. To boil bones of your fellows to pull the marrow out, there in a desperate winter. He frowns, watching Francis. The captain is steadier now, several years into his hard-won sobriety. 

_You don’t get to have that. I was there with him when he got cleaned up. I saw the sweat on his brow, smelled the sick on his breath. I was there. You don’t get to take him. Keep him._ But he says nothing. James looks away. 

Some things are meant to stay behind; some things should be left on the shale.

“Tell me about the north," a lady asks. "It must be utterly beautiful.”

_Beautiful as cut glass. As a forest fire._ Dread rattles James’ bones. This question comes time and time, asking him to tell them of the Arctic. To tell tales of a beautiful and glittering otherworld dotted with icicles and polar bears. With carpets of white and palaces for snow queens. How to speak of that strange place? He is marked by it. Claimed by it. He has no evidence but he is certain that somehow the Arctic will claim him. Yes, he might have left but he has not escaped.

Tell us, they say.

_And what shall I tell you? The cut of frostbite so deep, it kills the tissue in a man’s leg and freezes his fingers to blacken and rot off? The dark lines of lead-tainted gums, the infernal sound of incessant coughing? The damned white, that cursed snow that whips up at a wind and blankets your vision? The cold - the pressing cold that burns so deep that nothing will warm you, nothing will keep you, you will never escape it. Not in a summer years later and halfway across the globe, not by slicking oil down your skin and lighting yourself afire. No, the cold doesn’t leave. Never._

“Yes, tell us!” Another voice comes. “Were there bears? I’ve heard that polar bears are huge and vicious. Did you kill any?”

“Right shot to the head with a fine musketlock would take down anything,” someone else adds.

James feels sick. A foot presses against his own beneath the table. Just this, boot to boot. Francis watches him sidelong, quiet and careful. "Steady on," Francis murmurs. James stops breathing for a moment. His throat in knots, the oxygen smothered by the weight of his heart. Want is never light. 

_Tell us a story, James,_ the cry comes. The smiles at the clubs and parties are easy. He wears a false face, grins easily. A story. Cut out the middle. Tell about setting out from Greenhithe. Sewing clothes for Jacko. The wine had flowed at Franklin's table and the laughter too. Tell the end, the look of fur-bundled men in the faded distance, the sound of boots crunching on ice. The relief of open water and a warm bed. (The middle, not the middle. The cold in his lungs, the barren landscape of his stomach. The smell of the dead in sickbay, the color of blood on snow. Carving the gravestones for the first three, there on Beechey Island. Francis' grim face lifted to a harsh sky. _This is the end, this is the end, this is the end. Terminus est. Finis terre. We have come to the end of the world and have no way back. Never let me go. Never put me down. Don't you dare leave me here. Don't walk away. You won't, will you?_ No, not the middle. Leave that part out.) The questions keep coming. Where do they end? What use is there for a sailor on land? For a seaman who has left the sea? What space is there for the lost returned? After their return, there had been parties and fetes, photographs and headlines. But neither James nor Francis had sought out the limelight and slowly, it had turned away. It's strange to return. To come back, three years later, and find that the world did not wait for you. There had been a wound once, when they had been counted dead and gone. But like all wounds, it had healed. Closed up. Scarred over. Now that they've returned, there's no space to come back to.

_Why did you go? Because it was needed; because they asked us to._

The room is too warm. The wool of his coat itches and the collar chokes him. James breathes in, looking toward the dark window. Snow falls. It isn’t the same sort of snow as that of the Arctic, but it is close enough. He stares at it, half-wistful for a death he had nearly had. Why did he come back? He grits his teeth and spies the doors in the far corner, leading out to the balcony and beyond then to the gardens. 

“Pardon me,” he murmurs, excusing himself for air.

A small gazebo sits near the back of the garden. He wanders to it, leaning his arms against the railing to look upward at the netting of stars. He had known a story once of a woman who lived alone in the middle of the dunes. Her house had been a pit in the sand with only the stars to look at. Each morning she had gone out with her shovel, digging out the sand that had crept in during the night. Each day there had only been enough time to get the sand from the night out. There was no progress to be made. Like keeping a sinking ship afloat, bailing out the water as it comes. Sometimes, you can only hope to keep up.

Funny what things the mind dregs up.

“Damned nice to see familiar sky again, isn’t it?” 

James blinks.  He is not alone. A figure moves out of the shadows. A lean figure in a similar coat of navy wool, a familiar littering of medals over his breast. His rust-red hair catches in the faint light. "After Antarctica, it took me a full bloody year before I shook the feeling as if every room were too small."

_Ross._ James stares at him, stumbling out a greeting, pulling a smile on his face like picking a jumper out of the dirty laundry. A blush fights with his features as James remembers all too easily a scene in _Terror_ ’s Great Cabin, his own knee pushed between Francis’ thighs and that biting jealousy in his mouth. _Don’t call me by his name,_ James had hissed, sick of being second-best. _Don’t use my name and mean his, don’t fuck me and pretend it’s him beneath you, don’t you dare kiss my mouth and wish it belonged to him._

For a passing moment, James is grateful his olive skin rarely shows his flushes. 

“I rather think that's why so many of us don't stay long on land,” Ross continues.  “It's difficult to come back to. Figure out where you belong again.”

“You may have a point,” James says, glancing from him back to the stars above. His forehead wrinkling as he looks upward. “Easier aboard ship. No questions there, are there?”

“Yes, indeed,” Ross comes closer, bearing a smile. “I hear you’re coming for the holiday.”

James stills. “I had the pleasure of the invitation, though if - “

“Please _do_ come,” Ross says, looking up with him to the sky and back. James wonders what he finds up there. “Francis is at odd ends without you there to keep him in check.”

James finds a dry laugh to offer. “Nosing at the flowers and scowling them into shape, no doubt.”

Ross grins. “The very thing.”

“Heaven knows what he’ll find in the winter to keep him amused. Just snow and - “

“Ice.” 

James is silent. “How large is the party? For Christmas?”

The quirk of Ross’ brow betrays something but James cannot tell what it may be. “Just as it was in September. Please do come, Francis will be an awful terror if you do not.”

When Ross leaves him in the gazebo, James has the cold air of the November evening upon his skin and only the stars as company.

The stars at least, silent though they might be, are familiar. James knows where he stands with them. 

“Are you standing out here alone?” Francis’ breath puffs in the chill, forming familiar clouds. If the glitter of the party is ignored, if the steady ground beneath his feet is ignored, James nearly believes he is still in the ice. That this is the gunwale and not a gazebo’s railing. A dream. Stop dreaming. Wake up, James. See who you’ve lost in the night, count out the coffins and sew your sailors up. How many lives did you keep in your hands? Were your hands ever big enough, ever steady enough, to keep them all safe?

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” Francis says.

“And _you'll_ perish from fretting. Francis, I’m quite alright.”

Francis raises a half-amused brow. “And _that’s_ as tall a tale as any of yours. Come, let’s get out of here.”

* * *

They find a small dining house on Fetter Lane. James nurses his pie and a pint of claret. The lights low enough to cast shadows. Francis watches James and watches the fork, seemingly mentally tallying the bites, ensuring it's enough. 

“They would stuff our dead bodies and truss them up on the bridge if they could,” James says. “All for God and country.”

“Aye, they would.” Francis agrees, his tone dark. “Tis better the lost stay lost then, I suppose.”

“Yes,” James’ voice is faint. Indistinct. 

“James.” 

James looks up. Francis holds his eye contact, steady as ever. Why does it always feel like drowning? He cannot tell when he is more lost, with Francis or apart from him. Water, water everywhere and every drop to choke on. Yet, when Francis looks at him, James imagines there might be a raft somewhere. That he might surface and cough up the water in his lungs. 

“It’s over, James,” Francis says, folding his napkin. “We gave them their one night of finery and now - “

“Now what, Francis? Six months? A year? Before the orders come again?”

Francis is quiet. James inhales, chews on the inside of his cheek, looks away. “They might very well- the Passage again - “

“Yes, I know.”

“I cannot - “

“You _won’t_.”

“How do you know?” James asks, his voice low. His hand rests on the table, small tremors betraying him. Francis’ own hand twitches, just once. Twice. As if wanting to reach out and still James’ own. 

“We’ll sort it out. Take it day by day.” Francis pauses. “You’ll be at Rose Hill while I’m away, yes? I’ll write to you there.”

“Yes,” “James says. “How long will you be gone?" The cottage pie steams before him and Francis watches James push the food around on his plate, picking at the peas and carrots, leaving the meat uninterrupted. 

"A month. Perhaps two. It will not be long, I've only some business. Family matters."

"Of course."

Francis looks from him to James’ torn-apart pie, half-eaten, the beef abandoned. He pushes his dinner roll across the table, pausing to scoop some parsnips onto James’ plate. “You should try this,” Francis murmurs. “It’s very good.”

James tears the roll in half, closing his eyes while he swallows. “Thank you.”

Francis sips his tea with an expression that he knows what he is being thanked for.  "You'll come for Christmas?" Francis doesn’t blink, as if he might imagine that closing his eyes even for a moment would allow James to disappear.

"I shall. I promise.” He offers a small smile. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

* * *

James, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.

A dream of a lonely ship crossing the endless ocean. James stands at the gunwale, no one to his right and no one to his left. It is early and here, deep in midwinter, there is only night. Blackness rules here in these months.

A night without boundaries. A night without a sunrise.

_Where are you? Where? Where are you?_

_Where?_

Here, in a quiet townhouse in London, Captain James Fitzjames wakes. Half-blind from sleep and gasping for air. James tosses and rolls over. Throws the covers off. Moves to the window, brushing the heavy valance out of the way. In the absence of what he wants, he drags his fingers over anything else, trying to fill himself up. The velvet curtain, the woodgrain of his oak desk. The little stone here, set next to his lamp and inkwell.

He does not forget what it had felt like to die. What Francis' too-thin near-corpse had felt like beneath his frozen hands. In the end, James had discovered, everything was white. The sky, the earth, the clouds, the sun. His very fingers were white, if he had paused to peel back his glove. The land was barren and stripped away. Pebbles crunched under his boot and if he closed his eyes, he could very nearly hear the sea. But there was no ocean there, there had been nothing. Nothing but a mocking wind. The sun glared brightly through the ice, bouncing off the thin sheen of verglas covering the rocks and boulders. Sometimes the wind peeled away the snow like skinning a deer, leaving only the barren dead earth below.  M ostly, it had been white. Blizzards picked up without warning, erasing all visibility. In the blizzard, he and Francis had found what shelter they could and leaned together while the earth howled and shattered apart around them. Sometimes, when Francis was too still, James worried that he had frozen to death in his sleep. Sometimes he hoped that might be the case. Turn the lights off, turn the temperature down. Go to sleep. You won't feel the scraping hunger in your stomach then. 

His eyelids are as heavy now as they were heavy then. It is never a restful sleep. There, when he had closed his eyes, he never knew if he might open them again. Francis had been solid against his side, slow-moving. James had looked over, one eye thick with blood. What had he had then? The comfort of touch. He had squeezed Francis' hand within his own. Glove to glove, pressed in against the beating storm. Francis squeezed back. Alive then. Still alive. Now, as it had been true enough then. Only now, the expanse of the bed is empty and no one touches his hand. He is so tired. Will he wake? He doesn't know. It does not matter. 

It is different after.

He is a body and his body is his. James can pinch his own skin and find it bouncing back with the same elasticity it had had once. When he looks into the mirror, his face is just as sturdy, the gauntness filled out and smoothed by months of meat and bread, cheese and potatoes, all pushed into his tired hands by worried friends. Even the worst ravages of scurvy disappear within three months, save for the lost teeth. But there are false teeth to fit into place and his hair, where it grows back from how it had thinned, is as soft and shines just as much as ever. James hates it. It feels like a lie, to walk through the world in a body scarcely marked by death. To have scraped his skinny knees on Death’s doormat and been turned away, given his old uniform of health and humor, told to go back to who he had once been. 

How do you go back to _before_? He cannot imagine it. The shadows are only his to keep now, folded up memories. How does it feel to die? The James Fitzjames of old, even with a bullet wound in his flank, had not known. He cannot be that man again. 

How does it feel? The pale scrape of the world, the fade of black to white? His eyelids had grown heavier, his bones drawn down by exhaustion and gravity, as if the earth were already trying to claim him. In the tent, fading in and out, buried beneath his own miserable blanket and wishing for quiet, he had understood why wild animals crawled off to hidden places to die. He was too tired to speak, too tired to think. Consciousness, when it came, seemed unreal and disconnected from time. His muscles ached, cramped from holding himself perfectly still, finding one position that burned in his joints less than the others. He was afraid to move, afraid to be jostled; it might reopen another wound, tear the skin, he would bleed out more. That fear of wet fabric has stayed with him. James sometimes wakes to sweat-soaked sheets and reaches with a panicked hand to be sure that none of the damp is red. He touches the sheets, knowing it is only sweat and relieved when his fingers come back unstained. 

He wants some water. He moves to the pitcher and pours a glass. Stands in the window, looking at the night. Looking at his own reflection in the dark. The desk beside him is littered with newspapers and books, all evidence of years he did not live. Consider what is left, consider what remains unknown. It is nearly 1849. Not too long before, in 1846, an astronomer named Johann Gottfried Galle had looked up at the sky, thinking of stories about gravity, about mass, about movement, had spied a distant spot, and called it Neptune. Yes, we cannot rule anything out, we are still discovering our own backyard. A whole new world discovered and he had been too far away to know. To pass the time, James has taken to reading endlessly. He is fascinated and overwhelmed. Mostly, he reads about the end of the world. There are so many ways for it to go. The world hangs precariously in the stars. Just a swipe from an asteroid, a rogue gamma-ray blast, nuclear winter, then nothingness. Our lone cry silenced. Instead, it could be disease. We are not so far removed from illness as we imagine. Aftermath is an odd thing in places of war, places of disaster. We expect to turn away, wash our hands. _That’s done now, I guess._ Get on with our lives. We grow irritated that they need time; annoyed that they can’t keep up. _Hurry up now, it’s time._

You cannot go home again. Someone had said that once. (He’s not quite sure whom.) Uneasiness crawls up his back when he looks at the unfamiliar faces. He doesn’t recognize some of the paintings. Many had been destroyed, had been replaced. He looks at the old plaster of the walls, touching his fingertips to it like memory. He swallows, throat thick with nostalgia.  _What else have I missed?_ James' hand runs over the letters and newspaper clippings. Photographs and daguerrotypes. Men and women sit in frozen capture, their expressions forever fixed. Three years. Three years removed from this world. The iron steamship _Great Britain_ had been the first screw-propelled ship to make a transatlantic crossing. James hovers over this, fascinated by it. A famine had devastated Ireland. There are letters from Francis' family in Ireland. From friends. All stained by hunger and ruin. Some had sailed for New York. He doesn't know how many. There is a new pope in Rome. A new planet in the sky. The Americans had gone to war with Mexico and the French had driven off their king. The RMS _Royal Adelaide_ had sunk in the Channel, weighed down with starving men.

What has he missed? Everything. With half-closed eyes, he tries to remember his childhood home. Ham and bacon had hung from the rafters of the smokehouse. There had been sacks of potatoes and piles of turnip greens. Gone now, all of it gone. To go home is impossible. There is nowhere for the prodigal son. No place stays still in his absence.

Nothing has stayed steady for James but one man.

_Francis._

Two syllables. Two simple syllables that have spelled so much trouble. 

It has been on him since before he could remember. There had never been a time when those six letters were not to be found on his inner bicep. He had spent years staring at them, curious and considering. At one point, back before memory had begun, he had met this unknown and original Francis. A family friend’s child? Another mouth at the breast of a wet nurse? He’s unlikely to ever know. Still, the name bubbles within him and James leans forward, his blood sparking with heady wonder, each time he is introduced to a new Francis. Each one he tries to see how they might fit together, if that perfect fit might make sense. 

He had been near desperate when he had been first introduced to Captain Francis Crozier, imagining that _this_ time would certainly be the case. Another sailor in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. An expert on magnetism. There would be much in common and much to talk about. James could not fathom how they might not fit together. Even the look of the man burnished in James’ belly in a particular sort of way. He has always had a preference for older men, lines on their faces and skin sanded down. He likes a body that can hold him like an anchor, their steadying weight keeping James’ flotsam self in place. At the play’s performance, celebrating the Antarctic Expedition led by Sir James Clark Ross, James had spied Francis Crozier and thought his fair hair had caught the golden light very well.

Then they had been introduced. Francis had opened his mouth and James realized how very wrong he was.  He smothers a wild laugh now, remembering how he had loathed Francis once. Strange where the winds can blow you.

 _Francis._ This love like a ghost. All love stories are ghost stories. James closes his eyes, listening to himself breathe.  _God, I want you. (I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't.)_

James has been tossing and turning all night, his hand twisting down through the sheets, his hot skin prickling at the blankets. It is impossible to forget the feeling of how Francis had pushed against him once, one wide palm at his chest, pushing James back against the wall of the Great Cabin. It’s impossible to forget the exact heat of Francis’ mouth, the exact weight of his body holding James in place like an anchor. Steady, steady again. It’s impossible to look at his own body now, if he stands before a mirror, and not know the places of his body that Francis likes to rest his hands on. His hips, where Francis’ hands linger as they kiss. His throat, where Francis had rubbed a wondering hand over his Adam’s apple before kissing the roughness of his touch away. His chest, where Francis had slept once with his head over James’ heart, James’ hands slowly moving through his hair. 

His heart, which had been his own once. Now, it’s Francis’ alone. 

He groans, thinking about pulling the other man on top of him, bringing him to the edge over and over and over again until sweat drips down Francis' staccato back and his throat is rubbed raw. (In his mind’s eye, Francis is on top of him, their fingers interlaced, skin melded into one flesh, head thrown back and mouth open.) The desire wells up in him white-hot as an explosion and desperate as a firecracker. He bites the inside of his cheek. Curls his fingers around his own cock, there pressing against himself. _Easy, easy._ He gives in, stroking himself in the way he likes best. James pushes his head back into the pillow, rubbed raw by his own body’s betrayal. It burns to want like this. What would it be like to pull off Francis' shirt and see him finally laid bare before James? A feast for the senses, ready to be discovered. Francis has always been careful to keep his shirt on and James wonders if there is a name on his skin and where it might be found. 

He hopes it says _James_ ; he prays it does not say _James._ For if a James were to be found etched into the very skin and bones of Francis Crozier, how could it be anything but James Clark Ross? Francis has always been obvious in his affections, looking forlorn and lovesick each time Ross' name had come up. 

He has been empty for so long. He is tired of starving. 

_Look at me. Look at me. Please look._ In another room across the city, what will you find? Hair the color of canvas tents, eyes as green as gangrene. _Let me touch you please god be warm please let me hear you. Please be warm, don't slip away in the night. Don't turn down the heat. Warm me up slowly; restart my unbeating heart._ In bed, he dreams. They could take this room, the one at the top of the stairs, where the north and east corners join. It is his favorite room. The sun has spent so long beating at it that it has crept in and fallen into the cracks of the weathered floor. Imagine their shared bed. Imagine it soft and unmade, smelling of iron and cedar. Late lilacs might sit in vases. Their robes each hung upon a hook near the door. Impossible, of course, but that is why we dream.

He sleeps.


End file.
